Current mood

To all the linear programming enthusiasts out there, how are you gearing up for dual variables day? #orms

Not the Onion. RIP Lizard www.news9.com/oklahoma-cit...

Okay, who’s gonna MIP it first? And make a web interface? #orms

📢 Abstract submission for the EUROYoung Workshop 2026 in Lugano (CH) opens soon! 📅 Workshop: 14–16 October 2026 📝 Abstracts: 10 March – 15 April 2026 Join young researchers in OR for talks, networking & social events. 💻 euroyoung.eu/lugano2026 📧 [email protected] @euroyoung.bsky.social

If I were creating a GenAI tool for vibe coding, I’d call it ALollipop

Breaking: Supreme Court Reverses Lower Court Order That Redrew Congressional Map in Staten Island, with Ominous Implications for Voting Rights Act electionlawblog.org?p=154596

In 2019 I created a Story Map explainer of NC's distinctive county grouping requirement for legislative redistricting. Soon that resource will vanish (Esri is retiring that old platform). If you want a refresher on the so-called "Stephenson" process, now's the time! #NCPol 1/3 arcg.is/1DnDO

Essentially, a heuristic method to minimize county splitting, as proposed by NC courts

Question for #orms people: do you know any problem-specific cutting planes that are not too hard to explain and separate and would improve performance compared to a baseline MIP solver (e.g. SCIP, Gurobi)? Asking because its more fun for students if they implement something and it helps performance

There’s a new paper on arXiv saying the matching polytope has extension complexity O*( 1.5^n ), beating the Edmonds bound O( 2^n ).

Districts of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi: www.tbp.org/districts.cfm

Why are LaTeX's default page margins so wide? www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/09...

I was grateful to be quoted in this great early look at the midterms in today's Washington Post. As I told the reporter, I think the redistricting wars are basically a draw in the short-term, but the long-term loser is American democracy. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

New Publication Ethics Policy for @informs.bsky.social. Created partially to address “emerging challenges unique to today’s publishing environment, including the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI)” pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/o...

I have desk-rejected papers for many reasons. This year was the first time I did so because of non-existent references

Our #orms paper was plagiarized in an expert witness’s report (Exhibit A in Williams v. NYBOE). I don’t know whether to be flattered or upset… Expert report: vhdshf2oms2wcnsvk7sdv3so.blob.core.windows.net/thearp-media... Our paper: pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Districting at Amazon #orms www.amazon.science/news-and-fea... optimization-online.org/2025/12/the-...

When cartoon characters discuss numbers in base ten rather than base eight, it takes me completely out of my suspension of disbelief. Their society would not have developed that way.

The scgraph team has a nice example showing how to populate data for the 49-city TSP instance of Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson colab.research.google.com/drive/1tki1Q... #orms

This semester, I used Python+Gurobi to assign ~70 graduate student TAs to ~20 courses. Here’s (roughly) the code that I used, as applied to a toy example github.com/AustinLBucha... #orms @gurobioptimization.bsky.social

This may be the best thing ive read yet on AI in higher ed, and its written by a Yale undergrad. Highly recommend.

The TN state constitution requires maps to split as few counties as possible. Our recent paper finds the enacted map splits twice this amount bsky.app/profile/aust...

Americans momentarily searched for Redistricting more than Taylor Swift yesterday.

For anyone who missed the talk, he talked about this in the #ROW some time ago: youtu.be/ZpMgnrKhWzU?...

The 2025 ICS Student Paper Award winner is Hao Hao (CMU) for the paper "Robust Paths: Geometry and Computation," co-authored with Peter Zhang.

Brad gave my favorite talk at this year’s INFORMS #orms

This Halloween, I’m now “Almond Joy tastes good” years old

The @stechlab-labels.bsky.social labeler is indeed very useful to weed out who to follow

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast. We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

Congrats to my former student Maral for winning the Best Paper Award from the @informs.bsky.social Section on Telecommunications and Network Analytics! #orms

I have arrived at the @informs.bsky.social Annual Meeting. #orms Believe it or not, I was here for the Olympics back in 1996 too. I took a photo of Charles Barkley on a police horse using my kid camera

Revisiting last week’s open problems scandal, I wrote about LLMs as Lore Laundering Machines and why some are blind to the novelty whitewashing.

Soundtrack for the 2nd DIMACS Implementation Challenge youtu.be/dYNnQo-xgE8?... #orms

Industrial enginering professor Don Ratliff makes an appearance on This American Life, sort of podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

For nearly 80 years, an algorithm called the simplex method has been one of the most widely used tools for when a logistical decision needs to be made under complex constraints. A new update makes it faster than ever. www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-...

[new paper] Political districting to maximize whole counties, coauthored with Maral Shahmizad github.com/maralshahmiz...

Now that the kid’s asleep, dad gets to play with the birthday gifts #orms

She’s an industrial engineer!

October 16 Safeguarding Democracy Project Webinar: “Redistricting and Re-Redistricting Controversies and the 2026 Election” electionlawblog.org?p=152405

Congratulations to Thomas Rothvoss and Lang Liu, the inaugural winners of the Trevisan Prize at Bocconi University. cs.unibocconi.eu/trevisan-pri...

Network Science, and three of its avengers, featured in the latest @veritasium.bsky.social video (one of the largest youtube channels for Science education)!! youtu.be/CYlon2tvywA?... @stevenstrogatz.com Duncan Watts @barabasi.bsky.social

TIL that Fruit Bats redid the entire Smashing Pumpkins album Siamese Dream youtu.be/E8jDhs5MuvE?...

Yeah, I have fair point. I do all of my journal writing in Quarto, so that I can swap between formats, which lets me write Quarto => Typst. If a journal requires LaTeX, you just swap the engine and Quarto produces the LaTeX file.

On INFORMS Connect, Austin Saragih (MIT) advertised their new Python package (SCGraph) for accurate distances and shortest paths in *real* road networks (and rail, maritime, multimodal). #orms Getting Started: github.com/connor-makowski/scgraph Paper and Tutorial: ssrn.com/abstract=5388845

“The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off”. WSJ article from 1990 about Eben Byers: www.scribd.com/document/188... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_By...

“Staying sane on the tenure track” by Shane Henderson. Written in 2008 but still good advice for junior faculty. people.orie.cornell.edu/shane/pubs/S... #orms

“It was carefully submitted as by A.H. Land and A.G. Doig with no indication whatever that we were both women.”

All about Markov chains #orms